Classical musicians sometimes apply what they call the hundred-year rule to composers. Only a century after music is composed, they say, can its quality and value truly be appraised. By that standard, the works of Gustav Mahler, who died in 1911,...

Residents of Boulder, Colo., the often-kooky Rocky Mountain town of about 95,000, think nothing of day-tripping up the face of a nearby fourteener (climbers' parlance for a 14,000-foot-and-up peak). Perhaps that's why, once they've descended back to...

BOULDER shares dazzling winter sunshine and mountain views with Denver, half an hour away, and the ski areas a bit farther afield. But in spirit it is a world unto itself, a left-wing enclave where Beat poets once found refuge and the city council...

BOULDER, a half-hour drive from Denver, could arm wrestle any town for the title of fittest in the nation and walk away champion. In the last few years, the hyperoutdoorsy city pressed against the Rockies has been crowned everything from the nation's...

TANDEM SKYDIVING OVER THE ROCKIES, JUNE 14, 2007 Gianni Tanza (with face visible), 23, a butcher's apprentice from Denver. ''We didn't get to do it in the Marine Corps, so my friend Fred and I were like 'Hey, for 190 bucks, let's do it.' The plane...

WILLIAM E. SCHMIDT is chief of The Times bureau in Denver. Like residents in a lot of pretty towns near the mountains, folks in Boulder are quick to argue that it is not just another pretty town near the mountains. Boulder is, after all, the seat...